Is Bill Clinton the Devil? Maureen Dowd speculated on that possibility in a column last week. Her theory was fleshed out with boldly original references to swiveling heads and green vomit, along with hard-to-obtain information like the fact that James MacDougal recently died and David Brock recently retracted his troopergate story. But the Devil hypothesis came from a review of the movie Primary Colors in Time magazine.

The column raises some interesting questions, the foremost being: "Is Maureen Dowd the laziest human being on this planet, or just the laziest columnist?" (See also. "Is this what we're paying you people for?") Here's a supposedly ace reporter, whose wry, insider view of Washington has gained her the inestimable prestige of a twice-weekly column in a newspaper with a nationwide audience and a global purview - and what does she use as the main source for her column? Not Bill Clinton, not Joe Klein's fictionalized account of Bill Clinton's campaign, not John Travolta's role in the movie adaptation of Joe Klein's account, but a critic's review of John Travolta's role in the movie adaptation of Joe Klein's fictionalized account of Bill Clinton's campaign.

Let's do the math:

This is not to say Maureen Dowd actually believes Bill Clinton is the Devil. Actually, her column might be more palatable if she honestly held some Hal Lindsey theory of Evil's dominion and the coming rapture. But this column isn't about Bill Clinton; it's about the columnist's vanity, and her ability to extrapolate a cosmic view from a cheap anecdote, to riff on a theme like some keyboard Coltrane.

And don't think I'm complaining. I'm in the business of getting paid by the word, and it makes me happy to see a columnist at the New York Times getting paid top dollar for this kind of shallow gimcrackery. Maureen Dowd, after all, can't live forever.

And when it comes to shallow gimcrackery, I'm no slouch. A few weeks ago, I was given the assignment of watching a roster of hokey science fiction movies on video, then writing a column about it. The editor's comments came back telling me that I had to make more of a universal Point About Our Society with the column. It occurred to me that sub-Roger Corman celluloid might not bear the entire freight of American culture, but I wrote the column to spec and was highly praised for my insights. And now I'm waiting for my check! You can do it too!

This is the beauty of being a quasi-media critic in an age when a reporter's handiest tools are cheese fries and a remote control. Without so much as opening your windows, you can make grand, universal pronouncements about the world. The grander and more universal the theory, the more believable it will be. The more trivial the evidence, the more entertaining the column will be. King of the Hill? Evidence that America's forgotten middle class is making its voice heard. The preening nostalgia of hangers on for a dead rock star? Proof positive that we're all in love with the idea of cheap exhibitionism. The Jerry Springer show? Hell, that's the evidence that the sky is falling. Monica? Off the scale!

The one fatal flaw when you're doing desktop improv is to pause for a moment and ask "Is there even the slightest validity to the argument I'm making? Would it pass muster with a bunch of barroom cut-ups, let alone in a court of law?" These questions need not concern you. The beauty of metamedia colloquy is that it's both fun to write and fun to read - a magic balance of effort and reward which has never before been achieved in journalism. Matters of truth are secondary, and if there is one absolute genius of the style, it's Kurt Anderson, the Spy co-founder who snagged himself a bi-weekly sinecure writing about the "culture industry" in the New Yorker.

As an innovator of modern journalism, Anderson deserves this cushy sit as much as anybody, but to watch him in action is still awe-inspiring. In a recent column on the growing influence of the Golden Globes, Anderson deftly sidestepped the obvious explanation (that the Globes' audience, and therefore influence, increased when they were picked up for broadcast by NBC) to make a sweeping analogy about the growing role of sideshow demonstrations in entertainment and presidential politics (insert ass-covering reference to presidential politics as entertainment here). In what may have been his best column yet, Anderson used calculus and analytic geometry to demonstrate that the popularity of South Park, cell phones and Steven Spielberg's GameWorks video arcade were all evidence of a new infantilism, with disturbing implications for public policy.

The disturbing implications part is pretty much a must for these jeremiads. Unfortunately, the media commentators who actually talk about implications that are actually disturbing tend to be Johnny One Notes like Eric Alterman, with his holy war against the commentariat, and Edward Said, who reveals a universe of slipshod reporting on Islam and the Middle East. Who reads these guys? South Park and Primary Colors are so easy, and real life is so hard. When you can claim Jerry Springer or the Teletubbies as evidence that civilization is falling apart, why bother getting out from behind the mousepad and finding out whether it's true? Sure, we might be better off if Maureen Dowd would use her D.C. contacts to tell us something we don't already know (is Congress still passing laws? How'd that Haiti thing work out, anyway?). But jeez, we have a whole professional political class to take care of the complicated stuff. And yeah, yeah, using the rise of Mr. Potato Head as your leading cultural indicator is hampered by the fact that sometimes - in fact most of the time - a cigar is just a cigar. But who needs to know?